Thomas C. Foster - How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor

W E LIVE IN AN age of deliberate deception. That hideous fact is a lousy place to begin a book on reading nonfiction. Cant be helped. Worse, that deception poisons our public discourse, calling everything into question. How? Consider this scenario. You walk into a bookstore and cruise the nonfiction shelves: biographies, histories, memoirs, science explainers, works of psychological or sociological insight, self-help texts, yoga instructions, essays on all manner of topics, political analyses and treatises. A dizzying array. A clerk asks if you need help. You reply that youre simply looking for something edifying to take with you on your next trip, something that will leave you more enlightened than before about some aspect of our world.

I can help, says the clerk, but first, I have to warn you that there are thousands of useful books here, but two of them are not your friends. They are purposely trying to mislead readers into believing things that are not true, and they are quite good at it.

Which ones? you ask.

Oh, I cant tell you that. Threat of lawsuits, you know. Were required to stock them but cant criticize them for fear of dismissal.

How many books are you buying today? About the same as if a pharmacist told you that out of all the bottles in the drugstore, two contain a single poisoned pill, and she cant tell you which ones. I dont know about you, but Ive never had a headache that bad.

This is essentially the condition we find ourselves in today. Our world is a giant apothecary of information, and some of it is terrible. Worse than terrible, toxic. And much of that venom is spewed in hope not of infecting usof making us believe that it is true, although thats a bonus for the serpents who spew itbut of poisoning everything else, of calling all information into doubt. You know the drill: you cant trust any of them, everybodys a liar, one sides as bad as the other. Any rational person, of course, knows that to be untrue. Not every book or article or opinion piece or documentary or blog post is a deliberate lie. Not every biography is written to push a political agenda. Not every scientific finding is the result of corrupt data. But how many does it take to tar the rest? A very few. And then we react not with our reason but with our emotions: you cant believe any of them, we think. And the serpents have won. They dont have to succeed, only to make sure that everyone else fails.

How Long Has It Been This Bad?

B AD NEWS THERE: IT has been ever thus. Or at least ever since democracy eliminated the wrath of kings. From the earliest days of the republic, our political scene has been awash with lies, libels, name-calling, brutishness, duels, and canings. Since duels are illegal and almost no one carries a cane with spine enough to inflict real damage with its malachite head, youd think we might clean up our act a little bit, wouldnt you? Well, you would be wrong. The propaganda machine was in full swing in the early decades of American politics, which were also the early years of American printing. Powerful men bought newspapers, or if really desperate started them, precisely to print whatever they wanted to say about themselves or their rivals. There was no falsehood they wouldnt utter, no calumny they wouldnt invent against an enemy. A hundred years or so later, the age of yellow journalism was born in the circulation wars between Joseph Pulitzers New York World and William Randolph Hearsts New York Journal. That brand of news specialized in salacious material, scare-tactic headlines unwarranted by the following story, scandalmongering, and dubious reporting.

Nor is that all. Wealthy people have always been able to hire writers to undertake saints-life biographies that paint over the cracks in unholy faades. Corporate public relations departments have planted newspaper stories praising their firms accomplishments and hiding their malfeasance. Big Tobacco spent millions over decades in a campaign to hide the damage smoking inflicted on the lives of its customers. For forty years, ExxonMobil hid its own studies confirming global warming while denying that burning of carbon fuels was warming up the planet. And certain tabloids displayed at grocery checkout lines specialized in stories in which the starlet of the moment was impregnated by aliens and gave birth to a three-headed fish. Although the fish part may be my exaggeration. Meanwhile, persons with vile intent have dishonored actual war heroes far braver than themselves who have had the temerity to run for high office, as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, complete with a book and op-ed pieces, did against John Kerry in 2004 when it falsely claimed, among other malicious statements, that he had not performed the actions that won him the Bronze Star. The campaign was so nasty and so successful in diminishing someone who served honorably that it became a verb, swiftboating, the name taken from the type of craft he skippered.

The reliance on spin and falsehood became so pronounced in the early twenty-first century that of course satirists arose on the scene, most notably Stephen Colbert, whose onscreen ber-conservative persona Stephen Colbert (with a French silent t at the end), could spin facts out of thin air and nonsensical explanations from the flimsiest of materials, first on The Daily Show and then on The Colbert Report (with a similarly silent t in Report). His creation was both hilarious and trenchant in skewering a certain type of political being not unknown to Fox News and MSNBC viewers and talk-radio listeners.

In this win-at-all-costs climate where hyper-partisans cannibalize even members of their own party, everything becomes tribal. Books and articles are embraced or dismissed not because of their content but because of the supposed left or right leanings of their authors. Trolls, some of whom are not even in this country but seek to stir the pot from afar, attack anyone who expresses a vaguely political opinion or disparages an anointed personage. Social media increases the silo effect, wherein like only talks to like, so fewer people meet across partisan or ideological lines.

Silo effect? Thats what happens when people close themselves off to everyone and everything that doesnt agree with their own view. The result is that the only available view from the bottom of that silo is a tiny piece of an immense sky. Heres a working definition. The results of a February 2019 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll about whether likely voters believed that President Trump had told the truth about contacts with Russia were broken down by the sort of cable news viewers consumed. Fox News viewers registered positive to the question at an 84 percent clip; MSNBC fans at 21 percent, CNN viewers at a whopping 1 percent. I took the liberty of writing these results as numerals so that there would be no mistaking the story they told. The only surprise to me was that MSNBC showed a greater affirmative percentage than CNN, since MSNBC seems to skew a little more liberal than CNN. On reflection, though, it makes a sort of sense: CNN has been the constant bte noir of the Trump personal narrative, in consequence of which even fewer conservatives and perhaps even moderates tune in to the network. It may also be that the most liberal among us have shifted their viewing habits in that direction on the enemy-of-my-enemy theory of televiewing. The CNN viewership was also the only one of the three to register zero percent undecided respondents. Now thats a silo.

The thing about silos is that, minus the doors, they make pretty effective prisons. As for what becomes trapped inside, silage that cant be removed, the less said the better. That unspeakable mess, though, is not unlike what we threaten to turn our societyand ourselvesinto. We are so locked into our views that we cannot see facts in front of us. We become incapable of admitting that someone with a different viewpoint might be correct about, well, anything. Worse, we begin seeing all information as either belonging to our tribe or the opposing one, begin reading everything as either ratifying or challenging our world view. And that, Dear Reader, is a terrible state of affairs. If everything becomes about winning or losing, the real loser will be the truth. And us. A friend of mine has always maintained that his favorite maxim is A frog at the bottom of the well sees only a patch of the sky. Thats not the endpoint of the Chinese fable The Frog at the Bottom of the Well, but rather the setup. Lets hope its not the end of our story, either.